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Posted 09/24/02
My thanks and greetings to President Wright, members of the faculty, and students, expecially those of you who are here for the beginning of your Dartmouth experience. I think you'll have a great time.
Some years ago, when I asked Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg what qualities he looked for among the thousands of applicants to Dartmouth, he gave an inspiring answer. He said that he wanted young people who demonstrated the capacity to effect change, to work for improvement in whatever sphere of influence they occupied, large or limited.
So, here you are. Now, I'm sure that since Dean Furstenberg is the guy who let you in here, you'll want to make him look good. So you'd better get busy changing the world--it sure needs it. And since my generation has done such a great job, I think I'll give you some pointers on how to go about it.
About a year and a half after the Soviet Union collapsed, I was at a small conference in Russia with Mikhail Gorbachev's right-hand man Aleksandr Yakovlev, a leading Politburo member and architect of the liberalization policies known as glasnost and perestroika, processes which opened up that society after a long history of oppression. It was a society characterized by a proverb I once heard quoted by a Soviet dissident: "How do I know what I think unless I can say it?" People were not free to speak, and so even free thoughts usually did not take shape. This changed suddenly under Gorbachev, and I asked Yakovlev whether he and the other leaders had known where those changes were taking them. I also asked what emotions they had felt at the time. He said, no, they had not known where they were going, and their main emotion was fear. They were stepping onto unexplored ground, and they were scared.
That was a revelation. I had never thought about national leaders having normal human feelings, such as fear. And it set me to wondering whether Nelson Mandela felt fear, whether Vaclav Havel felt fear, whether Yitzhak Rabin or Yasir Arafat felt fear on that September day in the Rose Garden when they put their signatures to a dream of peace, now badly foiled. And I began to think that perhaps, on the large stage of world affairs, and also on the more humble ground of personal and professional life, if you're not at least a little scared, you're not doing anything worthwhile.
Fear can be turned into malice, of course. It has happened in many places, and it could happen in this country as we struggle to find ways of protecting ourselves physically while also protecting the bold liberties that have made us a free people. To preserve what we are, we may have to live with some fear. We cannot eliminate danger or perfect security--not in our national life, not in our personal lives. Nor should we. That volatile tension between risk and safety has long governed the interplay of Constitutional rights, police powers, and judicial independence. Surely, as we seek to counter terrorism, we are creative enough to find that same balance between risk and safety.
I used to tell my children, who are all grown now: If you don't take a risk, you're probably not doing anything of value. If you don't feel a little fear, or at least some nervousness, if you're constantly comfortable, then how creative are you being? How are you challenging yourself? What good are you doing? Don't stay in your comfort zone. Step out to the edge or beyond, and push yourself further than you think you can go. Don't be rash, don't be foolhardy, but recognize that you can take a chance if you are grounded in self-knowledge, self-understanding.
The war in which we find ourselves as a nation has pulled us out of our comfortable assumptions. It is a war with many fronts, as we're being told, and one of those is inside ourselves where we define who we are. A nation in crisis is something like a single individual discovering life. You also discover yourself, you define yourself. And you do that by questioning relentlessly. If each citizen can question and discover, so can the country as a whole. Your opportunity for such investigation lies here in Hanover now, where the beauty of the liberal arts education derives from its capacity to teach both about the worlds of learning and about yourself. If everything works the way it's supposed to, and the way it worked for me, you will come out of Dartmouth knowing your strengths, your interests, your passions, your causes, your priorities-and also where you are weak, and what makes your eyes glaze over. For me, it was calculus. I got a D, and believe me, that was a gift.
When I was in college, my mother once said to me, "Everything you have can be taken away from you except yourself. You will always have yourself, so you better like yourself." A scary thought. But you cannot like yourself, or even know yourself, and therefore you cannot have a happy, productive life, unless you get out of your comfort zone, take some risks, and step across the boundaries. I came to Dartmouth in 1960, and when I look at my yearbook now, it's shocking to see-not just that all the students were male, we knew that, but that almost all of them were white, and virtually all of the faculty were also white men. During my four years, I had exactly one woman professor. Hard to believe, isn't it?
Of course, we had diversity in other forms. By geography, socio-economic class. By religion, politics. Some of my favorite times were spent in the cluttered single of a conservative friend in Streeter-we didn't have fancy student lounges then-arguing into the night about race or poverty or nuclear weapons, I from the left, he from the right, learning from each other, testing our views, honing our rhetoric. I loved doing that. "How do I know what I think unless I can say it?"
When you look around this gathering, you may feel smug. Oh, see all this diversity? What an advantage we have over that old guy standing up there. But it won't do you much good unless you get out of your comfort zones of friendships with people who are just like you-whether politically, racially, ethnically, or by whatever other characteristic you may choose. There's a lot of clustering on college campuses around similarities. I know you need the comfort zones to kick back and relax, to recharge your batteries, no doubt. But then, also go beyond them, take some risks, make yourselves nervous or a little scared. Sit down with people you don't know, who are not like you. Get into arguments. Walk onto unfamiliar ground. That's one place where you will do your learning. How do you know what you think unless you can say it?
You have four years in an unusual community, where people of such diverse backgrounds are your peers. When you get into the working world in this country, you'll probably be part of a hierarchy that, in most cases will get whiter as it gets higher. Most of you will probably live in neighborhoods that are fairly homogeneous by race or class. This now is a fleeting chance in your lives to establish close ties with people who are different from you. Don't miss it.
In the classroom, I wish I had forced myself into more courses, even beyond the distributive requirements, that bent my mind in uncomfortable ways. I majored in sociology, and I'm glad; it has helped my thinking immensely. I wish I had also had the time to major in psychology. I wish I had majored in anthropology, and English, and history, and government. I wish I had majored in economics and art history, in Russian and French, in biology and physics and math-well, maybe not math.
I wish I had known more professors outside the classroom. I had several personal friendships, which I treasure to this day. They gave me intellectual and personal support. It can be a little frightening to invite a prof for a cup of coffee, but do it. I've met a lot of faculty here, and they're brilliant people, keenly interested in their students. But they're also very busy. I know from my own bit of experience teaching that it's mostly up to the student to take the initiative to get to know the professor. Those students who take the step, take the risk, are those who get the attention.
You are part of a pampered elite. No matter whether you come from wealth or poverty, from the United States or abroad, you now belong to a community that will be a lifelong association if you choose, full of privilege. When I arrived at Dartmouth, the sum total of tuition and average room and board was $2,245 a year. This year it's $35,817. That is twice the official poverty line for a family of three in the United States. About half of you pay the full tuition, room, and board; the rest have at least some measure of financial aid. But even if you pay full tuition, that covers only 59 percent of the cost of your education. So, in a sense, you are all here on financial aid of a kind.
Now, I don't want to do the guilt thing with you. But surely, knowing this, you must feel that having been given something precious, you need to give back. I don't mean just writing checks to Dartmouth. After you graduate, we will make that request insistently. You will give more richly if you give of all your talents to the larger world. In this, we wish you well.
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